LONGLEGS (2024)

This review may contain spoilers.

Earns points on the technicals (editing; sound design; cinematography, including some clever use of aspect ratios) but falls down badly on the script. Why spend the first act of the film establishing that our FBI protagonist can psychically pinpoint the house where an armed suspect is hiding, only to later reveal that she couldn't detect that Longlegs' lair has been right under her nose for over half her life? Why have an FBI director who grasps that a killer is targeting the families of girls with a particular birthday only to have him fail to show concern that his own daughter shares the same birthday? How is it that you can design a Satanic mind-control doll that can impel a family patriarch to kill everyone in sight but getting the doll in through the front door is enough of a logistical challenge that you need to enlist an accomplice? (The accomplice solution hardly seems foolproof, anyway: are people really that trusting of mystery nuns arriving on the doorstep in the first place?) I managed to turn my brain off just enough to overlook these plot contrivances (and I managed to squint hard enough to appreciate Cage's divisive performance) but adjusting my expectations continually downward in this way left me feeling pretty disconnected by the end, and admiring the Swiss-watch precision of the craft on display served as a thin substitute for having the crap scared out of me.

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